Kate Faulkner’s work takes centre stage in Cambridge exhibition on William Morris
The Fitzwilliam Museum will display Faulkner’s designs and a large altarpiece, while a curator’s new research identifies her contribution to an embroidery made for Morris’s Red House.
Kate Faulkner’s work for Morris & Co will feature in an exhibition opening at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge on 23 October, alongside new research identifying her contribution to an embroidery for William Morris’s Red House, the Guardian reported. The exhibition gives visitors a chance to see work by a designer whose patterns helped shape the company’s output.
The museum lists A Call to Art: William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites through 3 May 2027. It says the exhibition brings together paintings, drawings, textiles and ceramics by Morris and his circle, including Faulkner. The Guardian reports that a 6.3-metre-wide oak and silvered-gesso altarpiece commissioned from Faulkner for Morris & Co in 1886 will go on public display for the first time, alongside her textile and wallpaper designs.
Kate Faulkner’s newly identified Red House work
Exhibition curator Karen Livingstone’s new research identifies Faulkner as the embroiderer of a design depicting the Greek goddess Artemis for Red House, according to the Guardian. The embroidery, one of 12 panels planned for the dining room, is lost. Visitors will instead see a drawing of the design, alongside three surviving panels embroidered by Elizabeth Burden. The Artemis design was by Morris; the newly identified contribution concerns its embroidery.
Livingstone told the Guardian that Faulkner was ‘a key artist in her own right’ and said her creative contribution was fundamental to Morris & Co. Her assessment of Faulkner’s role in the company’s commercial success goes beyond the specific attribution of the Red House embroidery.
The Morris & Co designs still associated with Faulkner
Faulkner worked across embroidery, carpets, woodblock cutting, painted ceramics, textiles and wallpaper, the Guardian reported. Her Carnation pattern was registered under her name in 1875; her Mallow wallpaper design, dated 1879, is still sold by Morris & Co. The exhibition will also include a tile depicting Penelope, based on a design by Edward Burne-Jones, and decorative plates of the kind sold in the company’s shop.
Livingstone is seeking help tracing descendants of Faulkner’s sister, Lucy Orrinsmith, in the hope of finding a photograph or portrait of the designer. She told the Guardian that none is known to exist. Faulkner died in 1898, and Livingstone’s search reflects how little of her personal image survives despite the continued sale of her designs.
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Sources and context
- ‘A key artist in her own right’: wallpaper and fabrics designer emerges from William Morris’s shadowThe Guardian
- A Call to Art: William Morris and the Pre-RaphaelitesThe Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge
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